In the New York City mayor's race back in 2001, there was a candidate named Fernando Ferrer. He was the borough president – never mind what that is – of the Bronx (have you ever read Ogden Nash's famous poetic "tribute" to the borough, which consists entirely of two lines: "The Bronx? No thonx!").

Ferrer was, obviously, a Latino, but he'd never been a heavy ethnic pride-and-prejudice sort. In fact through most of his career he was fairly hostile to identity politics. But in 2001, he calculated that his path to City Hall would best be blazed by forming a coalition with Al Sharpton, and this "black-brown" coalition – very much the opposite of outgoing mayor Rudy Giuliani's base of support – was a subject of some concern, shall we say, in certain circles.

One newspaper published an expression of this concern in the form of an editorial cartoon showing a skinny little Ferrer bent down, puckering up to Sharpton's grotesquely corpulent back side. I bet you can guess which paper that was.

Yes, the New York Post. And even, or perhaps of course, the same cartoonist, Sean Delonas, who has now rendered the president as a chimpanzee (there's a little gallery of Delonas's worst hits, including the one I describe above, here). And let's not go through the tired and time-wasting motions of debating whether he "really" intended for the chimpanzee to represent Barack Obama.

Think through the creative, so to speak, process at work here. The cartoonist wants to convey, I suppose (the joke wasn't clear here, which is also part of the problem), that the stimulus bill is a bad thing and someone should be shot for it. Then it occurs to him that a chimpanzee was just shot in other circumstances. So he decides to meld the two events.

And Obama's race had nothing to do with the mental associations made? Come on. When were you born?

The Reverend Sharpton, whom I have known for years and with whom (as he would attest) I have not always seen eye-to-eye, is as right as he can be in this case. That's obvious. I hope he brings as much shame on the Post as he can marshal.

At the same time, I do think something's changed since 2001, or before (I remember another racially appalling Delonas cartoon about a scandal-plagued New York City housing commissioner named Laura Blackburne, but I won't even go into that because it will only age me).

Back when Delonas was pulling this on Blackburne and Ferrer, he was doing so, it seems to me, from a position of strength. The culture wars were raging. The left was losing battles all over the place – and frankly, some on the left were staking out positions that were crazy and impossible to defend. Shakespeare was just another dead white male and should be replaced in the canon by Richard Wright (nothing against him, but you know what I mean). "Hey hey, ho ho, Western culture's got to go," as they chanted in the late 1980s on some American college campuses. And so on.

The political manifestations of this thinking were on ample and self-defeating display as well. In New York City, there was a nutty professor named Leonard Jefferies, an Afrocentric instructor who promoted the theory that whites were "ice people" (cold, cruel) and blacks were "sun people" (warm, compassionate). He was, as you might guess, keenly sensitive to the various striations of white-itude, and so reserved a special animus for Jews and even distinguished among different members of the tribe (one woman, an esteemed education scholar, was "a debonair Texas Jew").

They were mad times on the racial front, in other words, and one could argue that in those days, Delonas was, however distastefully, representing a powerful resentment against all that kind of activism. The culture wars gave his tastelessness relevance, and the fact that he was going after lampoon-able targets meant that he was drawing from a position of power.

Today? He and the Post just look impotent and weak and silly. Barack Obama is not a chimpanzee. Whether one agrees with Obama's views or disagrees with them, he is widely understood to be a keenly intelligent man. The culture wars are over, or at least are nowhere near what they were back then in intensity.

His editor defended him, but I wonder what his ultimate master – Rupert – thinks. Hey, it sells papers. Maybe that's all he thinks. But I think Rupert is a little hipper than that. I think he probably understands on some level that Obama represents the future and Delonas the past. But Murdoch made this bed.

Back in the 1980s and 90s he staffed the paper with a bunch of political reactionaries, and even though he has reportedly shifted a bit to the left, he's stuck with them. They're probably revelling in the attention they're getting, not understanding that the current imbroglio is far less shocking than it is pathetic.